MIFARE is a registered trademark of NXP B.V. in the U.S. and other jurisdictions, and is used under license. Further to its conventional telephone function, a mobile phone may be used for exchanging information with a contactless device by using a contactless communication protocol. This permits the exchange of information between the contactless device and elements located within the mobile phone. Thus, applications may be developed such as mobile ticketing in public transport (the mobile phone is able to read the content of a boarding pass) or mobile payment (the mobile phone is able to read the actual loaded value on a debit payment card).
Near Field Communication or NFC is a short range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables such exchange of data between two contactless devices over a short distance, for example 10 centimeters. NFC is an open platform technology standardized in ISO/IEC 18092 and ISO/IEC 21481, but incorporates a variety of pre-existing standards including ISO/IEC 14443 protocol type A and type B.
NFC devices have the capability to support, in particular, a reader/writer mode which can be used to read from and write to NFC tags. Among the types of tags selected by the NFC Forum, the tags implementing the MIFARE™ communication protocol and the tags implementing the FeliCa™ communication protocol are noted.
In NFC technology, information is generally transmitted within frames as it is the case, for example, for protocol type A of standard ISO/IEC 14443. However, some communication protocols, for example MIFARE™ and FeliCa™ protocols, also use transmission frames including encrypted bits according to a proprietary encryption algorithm.
Despite the use of such encrypted frames, those protocols remain compatible with existing standards, especially concerning the transmission frames structure. This is, for example, the case for the communication protocol MIFARE™, which remains compatible with standard ISO/IEC 14443. Information about this protocol is disclosed in particular in the document entitled “AN 10 833, MIFARE™ Type Identification Procedure” rev 3. 2, Aug. 29, 2011, 018432 available from of NXP Semiconductors. Other details about this protocol can be found, for example, in the document entitled “Security Analysis of Contactless Payment Systels in practice”, Nov. 2, 2009, Ruhr-Universität Bochum by of Michael Zilbermann.
With respect to the FeliCa™ protocol, it conforms to Radio Frequency (RF) technology type F as defined in ISO/IEC 18092. The framing and protocol of this type F technology are also described in Japanese industrial standard JIS X 6319-4. More information regarding the FeliCa™ protocol can be found in technical documents located on the website of the Sony Corporation of Japan.